Lisbon, Sep. 13 (Lusa) – Mozambique could soon join a group of high-growth emerging economies, an arm of consulting firm McKinsey said in a report released on Thursday.
The southeast African nation is still excluded from a list of 18 countries that have shown exceptional performance and exceeded the benchmark growth rate, which the consultancy firm refers to as “outperformers.”
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) analysed the progress of 71 developing countries from 1965 to 2016 in its recent report, 'Outperformers: High-growth emerging economies and the companies that propel them', identifying 18 outperformers.
Seven of these - China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand - achieved or surpassed average annual growth rates of gross domestic product per capita of 3.5% in the 50-year period analysed by the institute. Another 11 - Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Kazakhstan, Laos, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - saw GDP growth of at least 5% between 1995 and 2016.
Ghana, Mozambique and Rwanda, which have recently enjoyed periods of strong growth, have overtaken these long-term outperformers in the last decade, thanks - according to MGI - to a “pro-growth political agenda” and the contribution of major companies that helped boost growth.
In Mozambique, MGI cites aluminium smelter Mozal (the country's largest and Africa's second-largest) as one engine of growth: it has generated about 30% of all exports and 53% of inflows of foreign currency since it was created in 1998.
“The growth of Mozal had a significant impact on the country's infrastructures and the company was responsible for the expansion of the port and the development of an industrial park near the capital Maputo," the report states. "The company, which consumes four times as much electricity as the rest of the country, has to buy electricity from South Africa."
Other potential outperformers, according to the report, include Bangladesh, Bolivia, Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka, which had growth of over 3.5% between 2011 and 2016.